Re: [Caml-list] [OSR] OCaml Standard Recommandation Process

[Brian Hurt <bhurt@janestcapital.com>]

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Jon Harrop wrote:

>On Monday 28 January 2008 14:23:01 you wrote:
>  
>
>>Jon Harrop wrote:
>>    
>>
>>>There are also many features that I would like to steal from other
>>>languages:
>>>
>>>. The IDisposable interface from .NET and F#'s "use" bindings.
>>>      
>>>
>>Is there a reason that Gc.finalise doesn't work?
>>    
>>
>
>Absolutely: Gc.finalise is only probabilistic whereas IDisposable is 
>deterministic. IDisposable guarantees deallocation of resources by a certain 
>point. (This is why you should never use Gc.finalise alone to manage the 
>collection of external resources!)
>
>So you write a "use" binding:
>
>  let read_first_line file =
>    use ch = open_in file in
>    input_line ch
>
>and it gets translated into:
>
>  let read_first_line file =
>    let ch = open_in file in
>    try input_line ch finally
>    ch#dispose
>  
>
What happens when I write:
    let broken file =
       use ch = open_in file in
       (fun () -> input_line ch)
?  Or some other tricky way to let ch escape the scope?

Monads strike me as being a better way to do this, but again, we're 
talking about deep changes to Ocaml.  The alternative- wait until the 
object is garbage collected, depends upon the form of the garbage collector.

Brian


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